Your Right of Defense Against Unlawful Arrest

"Citizens may resist unlawful arrest to the point of taking an
arresting officer's life if necessary." Plummer v. State, 136 Ind. 306.
This premise was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States in the case:
John Bad Elk v. U.S., 177 U.S. 529. The Court stated: "Where the officer
is killed in the course of the disorder which naturally accompanies an attempted
arrest that is resisted, the law looks with very different eyes upon the
transaction, when the officer had the right to make the arrest, from what it
does if the officer had no right. What may be murder in the first case might be
nothing more than manslaughter in the other, or the facts might show that no
offense had been committed."

"An arrest made with a defective warrant, or one issued without affidavit, or
one that fails to allege a crime is within jurisdiction, and one who is being
arrested, may resist arrest and break away. lf the arresting officer is killed
by one who is so resisting, the killing will be no more than an involuntary
manslaughter." Housh v. People, 75 111. 491; reaffirmed and quoted in
State v. Leach, 7 Conn. 452; State v. Gleason, 32 Kan. 245; Ballard v. State, 43
Ohio 349; State v Rousseau, 241 P. 2d 447; State v. Spaulding, 34 Minn.
3621.

"When a person, being without fault, is in a place where he has a right to
be, is violently assaulted, he may, without retreating, repel by force, and if,
in the reasonable exercise of his right of self defense, his assailant is
killed, he is justiciable." Runyan v. State, 57 Ind. 80; Miller v. State,
74 Ind. 1. "These principles apply as well to an officer attempting to make an
arrest, who abuses his authority and transcends the bounds thereof by the use of
unnecessary force and violence, as they do to a private individual who
unlawfully uses such force and violence." Jones v. State, 26 Tex. App. I;
Beaverts v. State, 4 Tex. App. 1 75; Skidmore v. State, 43 Tex. 93, 903.